In a recent publication, Eleanor Preston-Whyte (1974: 209) has noted the comparative ‘flexibility’ of the Tsonga and Chopi kinship systems, which allow for a greater degree of ‘individuality’ among these peoples as compared with other southern African Bantu-speaking peoples. This paper examines the place of the systems of marriage, divorce, and succession in the socio-cultural matrix which gives rise to an egocentric rather than sociocentric emphasis which is unusual in southern Africa.

The Islamic brotherhoods common in North Africa take a variety of forms south of the Sahara, but even at the very fringes of Muslim, penetration the great orders such as the Qaddiriyya have a part to play in the lives of the believers. One function they have is to bring adherents back to what members of the order see as the essential tenets of the faith, to purge practice of the inevitable compromises made with local ‘pagan’ cults, and to increase the solidarity of the congregation of the faithful.

A number of writers have noted that for East Africa, age organization and lineage organization are structural alternatives. More precisely, Southall (1970) has argued that the full and dominant development of age organization is incompatible with that of a segmentary lineage structure. Forde (1971) has similarly concluded that the two may be alternatives, and that selection between them may be partly dependent on ecological factors. However, I would like to contend that to write of the elaboration, or non-elaboration, of age structures and descent groups or of a conflict of allegiances, may well be a sterile exercise if it is unrelated to an analysis of the mode of livelihood of the people concerned. Furthermore, in light of the modern view of social structure as the outcome, at any point in time, of continuous processes of destructuring and restructuring, the ceaseless turnover of the membership of society, which age structures attempt to reduce to order, can be seen as one of the major sources of these processes, as Bottomore has recently argued (1975). Thus a source of structural stress, and hence ultimately of change, more important, I would argue, than the conflict between age and descent, is that between the generations.

The consciousness that Death will sooner or later expel him from the earth, despite all his efforts to make it a permanent home—and such a comfortable one for that matter—is certainly the greatest question facing man. Scared by the imminence of Death, man sometimes wishes that he had not been created at all; but having been created, he has no choice other than to accept Death as the price to be paid for living. Now it is up to him to ignore it so as to be able to enjoy the little time he has to spend on earth; he should then pay the price when it is due. Alternatively, he may want to challenge Death and try to neutralize its power. This, of course, is taking a big risk. But to succeed is to live foreever.

Eminent Indologists have stated that it is inappropriate to use the word ‘caste’ in non-Hindu contexts. Despite such warnings numerous Africanists have used the term, with varying degrees of imprecision. In this paper I first outline different emphases which have appeared in the literature concerning caste in India; then discuss several examples of hierarchical systems in Africa which have been described as ‘caste’. Finally, I focus upon my own fieldwork data concerning the Dime of South-West Ethiopia, amongst whom there operates a system which can, I believe, be unequivocally labelled caste.

This paper deals with certain implications of our ‘conventional understandings’ of the Kru and Grebo peoples of the Cape Palmas region of coastal West Africa. These ‘traditional’ scholarly understandings of ‘traditional’ political organization, when combined with misfocused questions about the nature of ethnicity, effectively preclude accurate knowledge not only of traditional polities but also of how a people's ethnic identity may be redefined with changing circumstances. Subjecting traditional perspectives as well as ethnographic data to re-examination may clarify the complex role of ethnicity among the Kru and Grebo.

Throughout the growing body of literature on Sierra Leone a considerable degree of error has persisted over the use of the term ‘creole’ and the resultant confusion has led to repeated failure to describe accurately the society of the colony. This is not merely an academic problem. The very existence of such literature feeds back into the ‘collective representations’ of the society and has provided a false historical basis for the descriptions of the contemporary culture of the group who are referred to as creoles.

What happens when women are denied access, over a long period of time, to formal education of the type men are given? This paper is a preliminary examination of the effects on Central Accra Ga society of this process, which began in a significant form in the nineteenth century. It posits a detrimental effect, not only on the women but also on the whole society, and on the relation between the sexes, of the systematic channelling of men into Western style education, while women were encouraged to stay in trading and home production, or given the equivalent of ‘home economics’ courses if they were sent to school.

The Dyula of northern Ivory Coast consider that joking behaviour (tlon, a word that applies more generally to ‘play’, such as children's games) is an appropriate mode of social interaction between a variety of categories of persons. Such behaviour is by no means peculiar to the Dyula and to related societies. For the most part, the kinds of role relationships characterized by joking among the Dyula have long been familiar to anthropologists: ‘grandparents’ and ‘grandchildren’, cross-cousins, certain categories of affines (cf. Radcliffe-Brown 1952: 90–116). But there is indeed one form of joking which, if not entirely specific to the Dyula, is something of an ethnographic rarity, or else has gone largely unrecorded in the literature: second and subsequent generation slaves (worosso) can and frequently do joke at the expense of free men (horon) in general. The forms which this joking may take are, in certain respects, atypical of other joking relationships among the Dyula. Consequently, it may be of some interest to compare joking between slaves and free men with other types of joking relationships.

This paper investigates the relationship between marriage payments, household structure, and domestic labour-supply among the Barma of the Republic of Chad. Recently, Netting has noted that ‘…household composition among farmers varies with the type and amount of labor required for effective crop production’ (1974: 29). Netting is supported by evidence from Europe (Chayanov: 1966; Symes: 1972); Africa (Jones: 1949; Basehart: 1973; Netting: 1968; Reining: 1970; Udo: 1965); Asia (Barth: 1959; Befu: 1968; Leach: 1961; Moerman: 1968; Yang: 1945); South America (Webster: 1973); North America (Bennett: 1969); and the Pacific (Sahlins: 1957). Implicit in this literature is the realization that the household structural types prevalent in societies are those which provide adequate labour supplies in specific ecosystems with particular agrarian technologies. While this research indicates that differing agrarian societies require varying labour supplies, it does not in general show how they achieve these supplies. This paper demonstrates how marriage payments may operate to regulate different aspects of household structure to provide adequate labour to the Barma domestic unit.

Any analysis of the process of political change is fraught with the danger of being rapidly rendered ‘out of date’. This is particularly so if the analysis concerned relates to a decidedly dynamic and changing country such as Tanzania in which not only does a swift succession of historical events, both internal and external, alter the situation almost from day to day, but also where policy changes and new politico-economic orientations manifest themselves with sometimes astonishing rapidity. These elements conspire to create radical structural changes in the political system, even before prior organizational alterations have had a chance to become ‘fully institutionalized’.